needle in the hay

For those of you who have been reading my romance novel, or rather, irritably awaiting the next installment, I sincerely apologize. I really needed a whole weekend off from work, etc., and the romance novel just didn't happen :( However, while it looks like I will not finish it in November, since that is only two days away, I am not going to stop writing it all together. I'd like to finish by New Years, but we'll see--the next three weeks are going to be super busy at work, so that makes it hard. And, there are all sorts of things to prepare for Christmas--I need to go shopping, and Terry and I are planning to decorate the apartment (we're going shopping tomorrow), and I have a Christmas party to go to on Friday for work, and I want to bake cookies and do other fun Christmasy things. Yay for Christmas!

Anyway, about my weekend, since my mother was concerned that I was dead because I didn't post the entire time...

Wednesday night, I started out with a fun Taco Bell run with Ritu and Sri, and then I mixed up two batches of my grandma's famous rolls, which turned out much better than the test batch I made last weekend, most likely because it was warmer in my apartment with a working heater and they actually had a chance to rise. Claudia and Marco came over (natives bearing pies!...that was Marco, not me, although I was more than happy to throw in some smallpox-blanket jokes, as is my wont) with some awesome pumpkin pies that Claude had made, and they watched VH1 with me for a couple of hours before going to San Diego for the weekend. Thursday, I got up and went to FloMo with 36lbs of turkey, my still-rising roll dough, the pies, 40 boiled eggs for deviled eggs, and all sorts of other fun things, and I proceeded to cook all day. It was fun, although I got a massive headache by the end of it--the turkeys turned out well, and the rolls were good, and my green bean casserole and corn casserole were as good as always, but there were a lot of people there, most of whom I didn't know, and it struck me as slightly awkward that I was basically running a thanksgiving dinner in a dorm when five or six of the current staffmembers were there and could have done it themselves. I don't mean awkward in the sense that I didn't want to do it, rather in the sense that it seemed strange to show up and organize it when it's not my dorm or my kids anymore, and had I been the staff, I probably would not have been overly thrilled (although getting a lot of cooking out of me would have been nice). Anyway, I hung out in Gavilan for awhile after dinner, then came home...

Friday, I went to Sonoma with Ritu and her boyfriend Maneesh. There were supposed to be like eight of us, but everyone else bailed, so it was just the three of us. Sounds like a bad idea, eh? But it wasn't, it was super-fun, and I love spending time with Ritu, and her boyfriend is tres entertaining as well. I only planned to stay until late Friday night, but I ended up staying until Saturday night instead. Friday, we were huge dorks, and saw the Charles Schulz museum (he drew Peanuts, in case you don't remember), and the lame Snoopy labrinyth that they're making that is currently only grass up to my ankles rather than seven-foot shrubs, and then we gawked at some men at a rehabilitation center when we found that the cool-looking chateau we saw from the highway was a Salvation Army men's site rather than a winery, and we had dinner at Chevy's and watched Finding Neverland. Verdicts: the museum was entertaining for awhile, the rehabilitation center was hilarious in a sick way, Chevy's was super-satisfying and way cheaper than the gourmet places nearby, and Finding Neverland tugged at the heartstrings in a surprisingly effective way.

Saturday, we had brunch at a dinner, then toured some wineries. It was really really great--I'd never done the traditional wine-tasting stuff before, and I had a fantastic time. We saw five wineries (Ledson, Kenwood, Benziger, Valley of the Moon, and Sebastiani), I bought two wines (a pinot noir from Ledson and a muscat from Benziger), and we tasted about twenty different wines, which was a good amount. We also took a tram tour of Benziger, which was cool, since we got to see the caves where they store the wine and I learned more about wine production. Yay learning. We had dinner at Panda Express (nothing soaks up expensive wine better than orange chicken!), went back to the hotel, I watched Men in Black while Ritu and Maneesh hung out in the hot tub, and then I decided to drive home, since I wanted to sleep in my own bed.

Today, I slept for like eleven hours, then cleaned the kitchen to rid myself of the filth remaining from the half-washed pans I dragged back from Thanksgiving dinner, then did some desultory VH1-watching, then read a romance novel. It wasn't very good--I hate anachronisms in romance novels, they throw me off, and so I was not pleased when the chick found a color photograph of her husband. The book was set in 1873, the picture was ostensibly of him as a child, which puts the photo in the late 1840s--so it's *possible* that he had a photo taken of him then, but the first color photograph was produced in 1872, and so unless it was hand-colored, she could hardly recognize his cobalt eyes staring out at her. Hmph.

Anyway, that's my life right now. I had a fun Thanksgiving, and Christmas is coming! Happy Holidays, everyone...